PILOT NIGHTS ARCHIVE:

April 2011

Venue

Taylor John’s House, Coventry

Co-Pilot

Talking Birds

Date

21st April 2011

The intimate setting of Taylor John’s House in Coventry was the backdrop for PILOT Nights in April 2011. Once again a host of theatre-makers performed extracts from pieces they were developing. The event was Co-Piloted by Talking Birds and featured music by Escalado.

FEATURED THEATRE-MAKERS

AutojeuHow to Climb Mount Everest

The Killer ShowThe Killer Show

Louise SingletonLittle Prodigy

BLAADE EnsembleWhat is the Entropy of a Blueberry Muffin?

A Thousand Hungry Seconds87 Little Questions and Their Answers

Sharp UglyThe Ugly Show

VENUE & CO-PILOT

Venue: Taylor John’s House (aka The Tin Music & Arts)

Since its transformation from the much loved mainstay of the Coventry music scene ‘Taylor Johns’ to a charitable organisation in August 2013, The Tin Music and Arts has gone from strength to strength. Named as a homage to the now sadly closed Tin Angel, The Tin Music and Arts is committed to creating a thriving, artistic hub at the Canal Basin and to be an active and positive influence for the community of Coventry as a whole – whether that be through regular and successful live music nights, or through the artist’s studio, the screen printing facilities, and the community space.

Since 1992 Talking Birds has been producing thoughtful, playful, resonant, mischievous and transformative meditations on people and place. Their work is characterised by a distinctive blend of humour, music and visual flair in venues both conventional and unconventional across the UK and internationally – from the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank, to Kilkenny Livestock Mart; from a cavernous underground car park in Scarborough, to a decommissioned hospital in Coventry, to a giant aluminium whale which swallows up audiences one at a time.

Work is made collaboratively, connecting people and place in richly imaginative moments of identification and insight. The work – always generous and thoughtful, in many cases gently provocative – is keenly, and often profoundly, felt by the communities in which it is presented.

The company is particularly interested in making work in places which the public don’t often get into, the sorts of places that you might stumble across by accident. Places which have interesting features, histories and former uses, perhaps layered with recollections and associations which are on the brink of slipping from living memory. Or places that are at the end of one use and not quite ready for the next.

Projects invite people to explore a particular place of interest in a mediated way; weaving together its stories – real and imagined – to make accessible this neglected or forgotten space and encourage people to examine it in a new light.